The AI Agents Are Real. The Strategy Around Them Is Theater.

The AI Agents Are Real. The Strategy Around Them Is Theater.

Nearly every executive claims their company deployed AI agents last year, but most admit the strategy behind it is mostly for show.

Stavros Roussos

An elegant, empty boardroom with a long wooden table and rows of chairs, no people, for the piece on the gap between AI-agent boardroom announcements and the back-office work that actually pays off

Photo Benjamin Child / Unsplash

The AI agents are real. The strategy around them is mostly theater, by the buyers' own admission.

Ask executives and 97 percent say they deployed AI agents last year; 75 percent admit the strategy is "more for show." The receipts back them up:

MIT's NANDA found about 95 percent of enterprise pilots show no measurable impact, on an estimated $30 to $40 billion spent
The real return hides in the back office, not the sales tools a board can announce on an earnings call
METR's randomized trial: experienced developers using AI were about 19 percent slower, and still thought they were faster

The show has an audience it is not accountable to. When a pilot quietly dies, the bill lands on whoever's role got restructured around it, not the C-suite.